NOT SO NEW DIRECTIONS

Music was my first creative language, but as a teenager I fell in love with 35mm photography. This interest was spurred on by watching Bill Ramsey, the designer and Photographer for my first album cover. I was in a band during high school that kinda sucked and we took our shit way too seriously. So of course we had an album cover that was super extra. In fact the cover art and the singer might’ve been the best things going… but that certainly is a different story.

Aside from the cover art process, I had a good friend named Kevin Dancoff that shared the same interest in photography as I. He was much more advanced and taught me a lot, especially about working in a dark room. We did a lot of road trips to mining towns and took a lot of photos. A few years ago a girlfriend was going through old folders of mine and found strips of negatives in a dirty sleeve.

Pictured above is a strip on a light table from that sleeve. These were shot in the early 1990’s and most likely developed when I lived in Chicago several years later. At the time I lived at an all artist building, that had a dark room in the basement. These went into a sleeve sometime in the mid 90s, and just saw the light of day a few weeks ago. There’s a lot more to that story… But that’s a different post.

Moving forward, Broken Banknote will continue its iterations of obsolete currency paintings. However, after living with the BBN concept for so many years, I find the creative mode is moving to a production mode. I now find myself searching for new ideas and new ways to tell a story. New languages, new tools, new environments and new processes. Just “new” in every way.

During this period, I will attempt to document and share this search with my readers. In truth, a lot of the time these searches lead you into an entirely different direction than what was originally planned. I like the idea of actually documenting this for the first time in my life and being able to go back against the record and see if where I “ended up,” looks anything like what I thought it would be in the beginning. I guess we will all see where this goes.